One more video and I’ll get to the one I really wanted to post. It’s going to happen, unless something happens to me or the site.
Look, I’m not posting these videos to insist that the dub is better or how anime should be watched outside of Japan. For that matter neither are the team at Cartoon Cypher, who are producing these videos. Speaking only for myself, the point I’m trying to make is that dubs are not somehow ruining the medium. Last week I posted a video that showed even the subtitles are altered for audience and for reading comprehension within the space of the character speaking. Japanese is a different language than English not only in words but in grammar and patterns that are better explained by a linguist. Even putting in swears are really inaccurate to how the sentence was said in Japan, so you’re not getting it right if you have characters dropping all the F-bombs if dialog is really the most important thing to you. They’re just trying to get the characters’ personalities across, although as noted in the previous videos in this set occasionally the English version led to a more interesting version of a different character.
If the dialog is really what matters to you as the “art” of the anime and if editing to the lip flaps has been the issue as far back as Gigantor or Speed Racer then maybe the solution is to just edit the lip flaps. Abridged series creators like Team Four Star do that all of the time. However, they’re only working on parody series. They didn’t do that themselves when working on an official dub. Plus that may help one piece of the art in theory but you end up ruining a whole other part, as this week’s installment demonstrates. Somehow they slipped a couple of nipple shots in there too, just as a warning.
